EU agrees final stance for Copenhagen climate talks

By Pete Harrison and Marcin Grajewski

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union leaders agreed an offer to put on the table at global climate talks in Copenhagen in December after healing a rift over how to split the bill.

Developing countries will need 100 billion euros ($148 billion) a year by 2020 to battle climate change, leaders said at an EU summit in Brussels on Friday.

About 22-50 billion euros of the total will come from the public purse in rich countries worldwide and the EU will provide a share of that. Many countries expect the EU's portion to be somewhere between 20 and 30 percent.

"I think this will be seen as one of the major breakthroughs that is necessary for us to get a Copenhagen agreement," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said.

East European countries said the summit had settled a rift over how to split the EU's portion of the bill in a way that would not hurt their economies as they recover from crisis.

"We consider this a success for Poland," said the Polish minister for Europe, Mikolaj Dowgielewicz. "We want to develop quickly. We don't want to become the museum of folklore of eastern Europe."

Leaders fell short of agreeing a concrete formula for carving up the bill and handed that job to a new working party.

"I would prefer this burden-sharing mechanism to be ready now, but this proved too difficult," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.